There’s no way to sugar coat it: The anti-establishment conservative – populist cause has been dealt a blow by Steve Bannon’s inexplicable decision to trash President Trump and his family in an interview for Leftwing author Michael Wolff’s anti-Trump screed Fire and Fury and the President’s decision to add fuel to the conflagration by firing back​ ​at his former campaign strategist and most reliable media ally​ ​in deeply personal terms​. ​​

The battle helps no one except the enemies of the President and his agenda; Mitch McConnell is tweeting pictures of himself grinning behind his desk in his Capitol Hill lair, the Leftwing media is in a feeding frenzy over Wolff’s claims that his book proves President Trump is incompetent and incapable of fulfilling the duties of his office, and Wolff is laughing all the way to the bank over the publication of a book in which he, the author, even admits that some of the sources quoted in his book may have been lying.

That’s right, in remarks quoted by The Business Insider's Kieran Corcoran, Wolff says several of his sources were definitely lying to him, while some offered accounts that flatly contradicted those of others.

So, why should conservatives or anyone else care about a book full of lies?

It’s not the book, but the effects downstream of the alienation of Bannon and Trump that are most damaging.

The rumor is out that the White House has indicated that the President does not plan to get involved and support anti-establishment candidates against establishment incumbents in the upcoming Republican primaries and establishment candidates are already attacking outsider candidates who have been endorsed by Bannon and his Great America Alliance organization.

​However, just because Bannon and Trump now don’t get along doesn’t mean that Steve Bannon’s analysis of America’s political and cultural problems is wrong​.

What the conservative movement needs now (and always has needed) more than anything else is leaders and leadership, and while Bannon’s statement clarifying his comments to Wolff was helpful, ​there is no doubt that the rupture in his relations with President Trump has seriously reduced Bannon’s ability to personally sell his ideas​ and the anti-establishment cause​.

While the rupture in relations between Bannon and Trump is damaging to the conservative – populist cause going into the 2018 primaries, from the perspective of my fifty-plus years in conservative politics at the national level it should remind all of us that our politics are about principles, not personalities.

In 1968 conservatives swallowed hard and backed the decidedly unconservative Richard Nixon, much as we swallowed hard in 2016 and backed Donald Trump, whose politics and principles were terra incognito.

Two years after Nixon’s inauguration conservatives, led by William F. Buckley, Jr. withdrew their endorsement and began to actively seek an alternative presidential candidate.

The reason wasn’t Nixon’s off-putting personality – it was his regular abandonment of conservative principles.

Lyndon Johnson created the Great Society welfare state, but Nixon funded it through his wink-and-a-nod alliance with liberal Democrats on Capitol Hill to increase spending. What’s more, Nixon took up where Johnson left off and created the EPA and the Legal Services Corporation, implemented wage and price controls and enacted a litany of other anti-conservative policies.

In contrast to that, while he hasn’t batted 1000, President Trump’s first year in office has been a huge success for the conservative agenda – repeal of vast numbers Obama-era regulations, the nomination and confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, the end of the Obamacare mandate, the passage of a pro-growth tax plan, and the shrinkage of the federal workforce by 16,000 bureaucrats are just a few of the conservative accomplishments achieved in the first year of the Trump presidency.

When I went to New York in 1961 to become executive secretary of Young Americans for Freedom the leadership of the conservative movement was a small group of passionate advocates of the ideas of individual liberty under God’s laws, constitutional government, economic liberty and anti-communism.

While too big to meet in a phone booth, a few card tables would have accommodated William F. Buckley, Jr., Frank Meyer, Russell Kirk, L. Brent Bozell, Jr., William Rusher, F. Clifton White, Clarence Manion, Henry Regnery, M. Stanton Evans and the other early leaders of the conservative movement.

Today, our movement numbers in the millions, and our leadership, while not as deep as I wish, numbers in the thousands. Between the Tea Party, Concerned Women for America, pro life organizations, such as Priests for Life, Heritage Action for America, Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth and other organizations there is probably a recognized conservative leader in most counties in America.

All of their work developing and advancing the conservative agenda is made possible by millions of conservative donors who support these organizations with their contributions.

And we have a well-developed conservative media, with local and regional conservative radio hosts like WMAL’s Chris Plante and national media personalities like Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham communicating with vast audiences and spreading the conservative message to millions every day.

Although having Steve Bannon on the inside as Chief Strategist was great, and having the regular active support of Breitbart News for the conservative – populist agenda is important, none of the conservative victories we won last year required that Donald Trump and Steve Bannon get along and be friends.

What was required for conservatives and populists to win those battles was that we each stood-up as leaders and called our Congressman and Senators, wrote letters to the editor, blogged and posted on social media, and pushed our friends, family, fellow civic club and church members to support the goal of governing America according to conservative principles.

You are the leaders you have been waiting for! The hopes and goals of the millions of Americans who voted for the Make America Great Again agenda are bigger than the relationship between two men.

Looking toward the 2018 primaries, the rupture of relations between Trump and Bannon has created a temporary leadership vacuum in the conservative – populist movement, so it is up to each of us to step up and do what we can to fill that vacuum; the need for top quality conservative candidates for every office is too great, our goals are too important, and our mission is too urgent for this battle of personalities to slow us, let alone to stop us.